A NATION CHALLENGED: BATTLEFIELD

A NATION CHALLENGED: BATTLEFIELD; Conduct of War Is Redefined By Success of Special Forces

By THOM SHANKER

Published: January 21, 2002

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20—
In the log book at Task Force Dagger, the field headquarters for all Special Operations missions in Afghanistan, the following code was entered for Dec. 12:

''GRN-GRN AA022 EXFIL'D.''

Green-on-green, it indicated: two anti-Taliban units fighting each other.

AA022: an Army Special Forces ''A Team,'' code-named Cobra 22, caught in the middle.

Exfiltrated: time for the American soldiers to get out in a hurry.

The men of Cobra 22 had spent more than two weeks advising Sayed Jaffar, a warlord of the Northern Alliance whose forces helped push the Taliban out of the northern city of Kunduz.

The town fell on Nov. 26, but the region was still dangerous, and now the nearby village of Pul-i-Kumri erupted in gunfire as the Jaffar militia confronted the troops of another anti-Taliban warlord. It was the kind of violence that for years had hampered the resistance.

Seeing no military logic in refereeing the dispute, American commanders rushed an MC-130 Combat Talon transport plane and two Black Hawk helicopters to extract the Special Forces from the scene. For good measure, an AC-130 gunship, bristling with rapid-fire cannons, flew shotgun.

American Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, whose experiences are reshaping war-fighting doctrine, faced many obstacles -- foul weather, strange allies, friendly fire and, of course, the enemy. And many in the military were surprised at how much they have accomplished.

Even as the war entered a new phase with the first use of American ground troops in late October, senior commanders were unsure that sending a few dozen advisers into the fight could topple the Taliban and cripple Al Qaeda. They were ready to throw much larger numbers of conventional troops into combat.

The ground campaign opened on one of the darkest nights of the war, four days past a new moon. And when the sun rose the next morning, on Oct. 20, two very different operations had been completed, as if to illustrate the choice of methods that the Pentagon was considering.

But the Pentagon spoke publicly then about only one of the operations that occurred that night.

Just hours after the mission ended, the Pentagon announced that hundreds of Army Rangers had parachuted onto a military airfield about 80 miles south of Kandahar while a helicopter raid hit a Taliban compound at the edge of the city. Dramatic videotape of the airborne assault was broadcast.

But the Pentagon said nothing about a secret ground war -- which quickly became the real ground war -- that started simultaneously in the north.

The first two teams of Army Green Berets to infiltrate Afghanistan landed by helicopter that same night, according to Special Forces commanders who planned the mission. One joined up with Abdul Rashid Dostum, the war-calloused Northern Alliance commander near Mazar-i-Sharif, and the other with Muhammad Fahim Khan, now Afghan defense minister, whose forces were then loosely arrayed against the Taliban in the direction of Kabul.

More would follow, but it was not easy. During just the second mission to carry Special Forces teams into the north, the helicopters were unable to land because of a powerful sandstorm.

''I cannot even begin to describe the frustrations,'' a senior Special Operations commander recalled. ''We were right there. It was like, just six more inches, but we couldn't get over the goal line.''

But in just three weeks, those A Teams -- as the Special Forces calls the detachments of a dozen select troops -- transformed the Northern Alliance into a force capable of routing the Taliban army, which was increasingly damaged and demoralized by the more precise bombing that the American target-spotters made possible.

Few things surprised the Pentagon and its commanders as much as how rapidly the military picture changed with the arrival of the Special Forces. The prospect of fighting big battles with American troops faded away.

Brig. Gen. Richard L. Comer, vice commander of the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Fla., said the more conventional plan had been to ''put in a large amount of American forces, hop them in by air.''

The alternative, General Comer said, was to rely mainly on the native forces opposing the Taliban. The thinking, he said, was: ''Let's start with that, see what they can do. Put Special Forces in there, knit them together, and see how good we can make it.''

If it had not worked, the war might have seen many strikes by large forces of Rangers and other infantry. In a final push, marines were to seize Kandahar's international airport by force, senior officials said.

''We reasonably expected to do a lot more heavy operations,'' a senior Defense Department official said. ''We might have seen more of those events like 300 Rangers dropping out of the sky on a given night. But the A Teams brought us a steady increase of pressure, and the sudden collapse of the Taliban. Nobody predicted that.''

The lessons from the Afghan experience are already being adopted in the broader war against international terrorism. In the Philippines, scores of Special Forces are being sent to advise and assist its army in fighting terrorists. In the Pentagon's war rooms, contingency plans are being re-examined, and top officers are declaring that relatively small but highly proficient units, operating secretively and equipped with an arsenal all their own, can quickly change the balance of power.